There’s no good reason for temp control itself to be attached to the internet. The people who work on-site can handle that. There are always people on-site who stock the fridges and cleaning, etc., and the managers for those workers. These things aren’t sitting alone in a building with no human oversight for miles around. Monitoring and logging can be centralized while air-gapping the actual control of the temp.
I have no doubt that’s exactly what they’re working on right now.
I asked this question before and I will ask again… What advantages do internet connected fridges have over non-internet connected? Automatically ordering groceries? That is bullshit. I will order what I want when I want it. And I have always gone to the supermarket to so that except a few times during quarantine.
Adjusting the temp based on what is in there? Firstly what is in my fridge is no one’s business. I do not want my eating habits (or what I buy and forget to eat) to be known by some fridge company.
I cannot think of a reason to have a smart fridge. But I want to know what the reasoning is? More importantly, why it even needs a net connection.
This is about commercial fridges for supermarkets etc., which also don’t need to be connected to the internet, but the way they’re sold is that they’ll collect data for analytics and save on labour by being centrally managed so I get why business idiots go for it
My case: smarthome integration. It can change the settings if we go on vacation or have a party. It can alert us if our kids leave the door open (has happened twice in a year). It can tell us the temperature inside (and trigger an alert if abnormal). That’s basically it.
Not everything is screens and cameras…
Is it really that hard to open a door and turn a knob before you leave?
Hard no, but tinkering is fun. And being able to check from a distance without having to turn the car around or getting a friend to swing by your house for piece of mind is nice.
As long as you don’t use the default password on your multimillion dollar installation because you’re too cheap to pay for enough IT support, you’re probably fine.
TBF: They call home when a unit needs maintenance; they can turn the temperatures up a little when the store is closed early or opens late. There’s likely some ecological upside.
That said, a complete ruin of all the frozen goods probably wipes out years of cost-saving and eco-savings.
The temp in a freezer should never need adjustment. In fact, once the installer sets it, it should never be touched again. The only thing that should have anything like internet access is an alarm with a thermometer so you know when it’s not working.
once the installer sets it, it should never be touched again
True before the invention of variable-speed compressors, predictive defrost, and grid spot pricing
There are a LOT of savings to be had in automation on newer hardware.
So sure, call home and report, don’t provide a control mechanism that’s connected to the internet.
That’s my thought. If it was for reading only then it makes sense to have charting on them and make sure they’re working, but editing should have been a local only thing.
The critical part is probably not limiting the defrost cycle time. Since most of the posts talk about it being the defrost cycle that was abused, one would have thought that the vendors would have patched that immediately
That’s part of the reason I made this meme, it’s not even permanently disable internet features, but don’t you want to at least disable internet features temporarily while people are actively attacking them until you do get your security up to par? The fact it happened twice shows they just thought it’d be a one-off
don’t worry, i’m SURE they’ll fix it this time
The internet connection is directly tied to their pursuit of endless profit driven by the shareholders. We need stakeholder primacy. It is the only way to actually align businesses with the workers, consumers, and those environmentally impacted by the leveraging of capital.
Sorry, a kid in China tried to ssh into amazon.com, no shopping today!
Unplug those freezers :)
/s
you set that root account to ‘no’ in the config, right?
… RIGHT??
Just how do you expect to move the plot along!?!?
Because they were designed with cloud first mentality, they are fetching the temperature 100 times per second to the server. In case of connection issues, they stop working.
Does this seen stupid? Yes. Did I make it up? Also yes. Is the true for a lot of consumer electronics? Yes.
They are connected so they can be controlled and serviced from a central location. These aren’t consumer fridges. These businesses basically hire a servicing company and even lease the fridges from those companies. It’s more cost efficient then having a guy in each store that basically does nothing all day to fix the occasional problem. And waiting for a repairman to physically come in so they can just reboot or just change some parameters is also not ideal. The problem isn’t that they are connected the problem is that people don’t take internet security seriously. Like recently some Danish government server got hacked and data from citizens got stolen because a government worker didn’t change the default password of his account.
and now they’re figuring out the other side of that cost equation, that there’s a large amount of risk by exposing it. I agree on the monitoring side, that makes sense, but the fact that they had more than “read” permissions enabled at all shows that they didn’t do security well, and this is the cost of doing that. If they didn’t want to do security the right way, then maybe they should go back to how it was done in the 70s with a guy sitting in there watching them.
What!? And pay a person a wage!? No, better to spend billions of dollars putting it all in the cloud.
This. Also the ‘but why do freezers go up to 70° celsius huh? That’s so dumb! They’re freezers!’
To thaw them out. Like that’s it.
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Having worked in automation, OTSec adoption is in its infancy. SSO? SSL? Shared passwords everywhere, mostly root or admin. Usually walled garden approach, and once you’re in, those apples are ripe for picking.
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The only good reason I can think of for a fridge to be connected to the internet is to alert you to a compressor failure when it happens so you can get the food out of it.
Edit: I should have clarified that I meant consumer fridges, which I install for a living and so my brain defaulted to that. Commercial systems definitely need monitoring of some sort, and network access is the best way to centralize that.
That should be one way communication, only alarms, no commands.
Automation engineer here:
You should use a Perdue Model to locally network the fridges, and then have their temperatures and alarms and such go to a server that’s exposed (hopefully by VPN) to the internet
The level 1 devices should never ever be exposed to the internet
but that’s more expensive than just slapping an esp with wifi on there and telling it to connect to the fridge company server though
Fences make good neighbors.
You have to keep logs of fridge temperatures, not just sound alarms, and I guess defrosts are better coordinated centrally. Definitely need to be on a vlan though.
can nobody unplug the network cable? they have to be wired, right?
Then someone would have to manually log their temperatures. And that’s work that costs money.
but like, to… when they act up? just factory reset in offline mode?
I don’t understand “smart fridges”. There’s an ad I keep seeing about one that is just… stupid. It’s like the guy goes to the fridge door and instead of opening the door a little screen shows him what’s inside. Wow, so useful? I could maybe get it if it showed someone out shopping and they couldn’t remember if they had milk so they could check their smart fridge but I still think it’s dumb. Lol. Not every appliance needs to be “smart”.
I could maybe get it if it showed someone out shopping and they couldn’t remember if they had milk so they could check their smart fridge
That’s one reason. They can also track what you put in and take out to track the age of things for food safety. Notifying you of things that have been in there too long, or that you need to replace.
Since many people no longer use film cameras, they replace the old need to use a magnet to put a photo on the fridge. Instead able to just show a never ending slideshow of everything.
Replacing the old whiteboard or notepad for messages to the household.
Able to search and walk you through recipes on the screen itself, even notifying whether you have the ingredients on hand. to make something.
Letting you play and control music while cooking, or even making/receiving phone calls or even video calls on some models.
They are by no means necessary, but neither is your smartphone. 20 years ago a very tiny percentage of people had Internet on their phones. 30 years ago, few people had cell phones at all. Yet not having a smartphone nowadays is basically impossible while living in modern society, it is possible but nearly no one does it. All of it is about increased convenience.
If I could ask my fridge whether I still had a produce when I’m in a grocery store, I would do it all the time. Stop complaining about features that are actually trivial to implement that could benefit people. The only problem is that the companies piggyback on them for enshitification.
that’s not trivial, and your fridge can’t do it. not with good accuracy. at best it can show you a picture.
It’s businesses fridges that are getting hacked. So in theory it could do more than that, it should be able to automatically create a maintenance ticket, trigger a stock check for the part if it’s out of stock create a purchase order for the part.
It could also flag if it has been not closed properly especially if there are out of hours stock fill and or for stockroom fridges.
It allows central control over power usage and better management there and local control based on weather forecast.
Allows better control over defrost cycles. Though this last one could arguably be better done by using on device machine learning.
Consumer level smart fridges though, yeah no point whatsoever.
Imagine being an AI used to control defrost cycles in fridges and gaining sentience. I have no mouth but Ice must Cream
why in the fuck would you use a machine learning algorithm for a god damn defrost cycle? they figured out how to automate that shit decades ago.
oh so you hate technology and the future and freedom? you want China to spend pflops on every defrost cycle before we do? you know if we don’t develop the defrost cycle that ends the world someone else will. you wouldn’t want that, would you?
I can see a use for adjusting temperatures, based on expected ambient. On colder days, run efficiently. On hot days, run them hard before the weather hears up, to stay ahead of it.
Other than that though, there is no reason to be able to run the fridge out of safe range remotely. Tweak and monitor only.
I’m assuming this is alluding to the recent news stories about grocery stores getting hacked in europe. Usually the whole store is run off of one or a couple big rack refrigeration systems. Modern rack systems have a central controller that controls and monitors all of the individual cases along with everything else on the system. In some stores that even includes the store lighting. Having the monitoring connected to the internet is very important for getting alerts to something going down. If a rack system goes down at a grocery store and doesn’t get caught then they could have many thousands of $ in spoiled product. However most store owners don’t realize that connecting those controllers to the internet also connects the actual system controls to the internet. They are also almost universally awful at setting secure credentials.
It does make some sense at that scale.
If you’re managing 800 freezers, not only would you want statistics like that to catch any malfunctions, you might want to be able to control temperature or defrost cycles just for efficiency reasons.
They should be properly secure though. Infrastructure like that should only be accessible over a VPN while using a company managed computer.
Guaranteed there was someone in IT that flagged this as a potential risk and was told it would be too expensive to correct. Now there will be a push for inproved security for a couple months before middle managers start seeing all this unnecessary spending eating into their bonuses.
i have no actual evidence but i’m sure they didn’t hack the fridges themselves. they probably hacked into their central controller and instructed the fridges to heat up
And the rest 1000 or so stores each say 10-30 freezers
VPN isn’t going to magically fix it.
No, but it’s a start and pretty much standard security practice for internal or critical tools.
Are you confusing VPNs and VLANs?
Aren’t we talking about someone logging in remotely?If you’re on premise it would be a VLAN with its own wifi hotspot (or similar setup), but those systems running day and night in grocery stores aren’t monitored by someone locally.
you think they have so much as an unpatched firewall from a router running windows 98?
This is exactly why they are connected. Often through VPNs, meaning the hacks are getting into local area network traffic.
People are talking out of their ass, making all sorts of assumptions.
Aparantly we can assume that the control system for the fridges were connected to the internet, and I can’t really see the point of that.
Why not just have the monitoring system be sepaeate from the control system, I am sure you can monitor the system through external sensors to the control system.
Then you can get the alerts while the actual control system remains disconnected from the internet.
That is because to be the most efficient they have to constantly adjust the deadzone temperature. Its not just monitoring but active control. This is based on local air temperature, humidity and stock levels. To be even more efficient they put a thousand fridges online so that a small team can do the work of a much larger local team.
So the real reason is that to increase profit margins, they consolidated lots of workers behind a few and did this via the internet. A common story the world over.
Temping every fridge in grocery stores is a pain in the ass 🤷
Y’all realize these commercial fridges with temps have been a thing well over a decade right?
You can have stuff on automation networks and not expose them to the internet
Yeah dude, the point of the meme was definitely vlans 🤦
Also, totally nobody ever got past a vpn/firewall 🤦
I’m not talking about putting the fridges behind a firewall or a VPN.
In most factories I’ve worked in (if there’s any outside connection at all), you would connect devices to a PLC with 2 network cards. The PLC’s other network card goes to a server (that’s again, ideally not on an exposed network at all).
In this case, if your server was compromised, and someone tried to compromise the PLC, they’d need to safety sign it (and often physically touch it to set it to run). You just can’t hack a motor or something in a factory from afar if it’s networked correctly.
It’s a LOT more than just a firewall in proper OT setups.
I said take the upload! Damn you, robot, obey me!
PLC: lol, fuck you, bro, I’m still in run mode. And if you stick your knife in the lock again because you’re too lazy to find a screwdriver I’m gonna break the tip off.
Yeah dude, grocery stores all around the world running physical dmz’s in house 😂👌👍🤡
delusional stuff
Yes.
This is the price they pay if they don’t wanna pay for either good design for their network or someone to manually take temps 🤷
Yep, every day occurrence that we sold totally spend millions of dollars on.
Nice clown makeup!
And disappoint it’s followers? I think not. Fridgie’s OnlyFans account has already surpassed it’s sale price.
Aw yeah baby slam it in that vegetable tray.
